New biography explores Rosa Parks' lifetime of activism

For her 100th birthday, the late Rosa Parks has received a special gift: a new biography by historian Jeanne Theoharis designed to prove that when it comes to the civil rights movement, Parks was more than a one-hit wonder.

Parks, born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala., is the African-American woman who was memorably arrested on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to obey a bus driver's order to give up her seat to a white passenger. Her arrest triggered a bus boycott in Montgomery and made Parks one of the icons of the civil rights movement.

In her biography "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks" (Beacon Press), Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, makes it clear that Parks' challenge was not the isolated act of a tired woman, as the haze of time and myth now seem to us believe.

Parks, Theoharis points out, was a lifelong activist. "The variety of struggles that Parks took part in, the ongoing nature of the campaign against racial injustice, the connection between Northern and Southern racism that she recognized, and the variety of Northern and Southern movements in which she engaged have been given short shrift in her iconization," Theoharis writes in her introduction to the book.

Readers who want a taste of Theoharis' research can check out her Huffington Post article "10 Things You Didn't Know About Rosa Parks." Among the revelations: Parks had been kicked off a bus by the same driver a dozen years earlier; Malcolm X was her hero, and she met him several times in the '60s; she spent more than half of her life in the North; she helped John Conyers get elected to Congress from Michigan.

"It is a rare gift as a scholar to get to deconstruct the popular narrative and demythologize an historical figure, and, in the process, discover a more impressive and substantive person underneath," Theoharis writes.

Her name may be familiar to Milwaukeeans, expecially ones with a connection to Marquette University. Her father Athan Theoharis is emeritus professor of history at Marquette, and a nationally renowned scholar of the FBI and American surveillance of its own citizens.

In her acknowledgments, Jeanne Theoharis thanks her father and her mother Nancy for proofreading her book.